Crit depression and combat table

hellord · 10/04/09, 8:30 PM

Recently I've done some testing that made me questioning about the behaviour of the combat table close to critical strike cap.
Common belief is that hits in the table are only happening if nothing else happened, thus there could be situations where you would never see a hit, but only crit, dodges, parries, misses and glances.
It is also known that against a boss class target there is a critical strike loss of about 4.8%. It is not confirmed yet if this value is valid for every class or for every weapon combination and only rogue's combat table has been extensively tested.
The discussion is here

During my tests I tried a crit capped setup hitting from the front and swapping out all hit and exp rating. Swinging with 1 and 2 handers I found out that expertise seems to reduce both dodge and parry and there also seems to be a ~5% hit that pushes out additional crits. This happened across tests with different expertise and crit rating equipped.

I'm collecting the data in a shared document that you can see at:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...yWGJITkE&hl=en

First test was made with no hit, 4.25% expertise +1% WM (-1% dodge), 40.77 paperdoll crit, dualwielder 1h as arms

Test 1
Swings	10036
crits	3307	(32.95%)
misses	2666	(26.56%)
glances	2402	(23.93%)
parries	1010	(10.06%)
dodges	110	(1.096%)
hits	541	(5.39%)

At the start I was surprised that hit and dodges were about 6.5%, so I initially thought that expertise was converted into hits rather than getting back some crit. But then I made some more tests as fury with 0 hit and 0 exp with higher crit ratings.

Test 3 was made dualwielding 2handers, Test 4 dualwielding 2 fast 1handers. Even if Test 4 had 2.8% more crit and double sample, the crit rating seemed stable, meaning I was above the cap. However I was still seeing aorund 5% hits.

Test made with 44.58% crit, 0 hit, 0 exp, hitting from the front dualwielding 2handers

Test 3
Swings	5093
c	1243	(24.4%)
m	1349	(26.49%)
g	1173	(23.03%)
p	711	(13.96%)
d	354	(6.95%)
h	263	(5.16%)

Test made with 47.37% crit, 0 hit, 0 exp, hitting from the front dualwielding 1handers

Test 4
Swings	10601
c	2506	(23.6%)
m	2890	(27.26%)
g	2492	(23.5%)
p	1462	(13.79%)
d	692	(6.53%)
h	559	(5.28%)

Test made with 46.59% crit, 0 hit, 3.5% exp (118 rating no racial)

Test 5
Swings	5845
c	1807	(30.91%)
m	1652	(28.26%)
g	1312	(22.45%)
p	628	(10.74%)
d	165	(2.82%)
h	281	(4.81%)

Test made with 46.59% crit, 0 hit, 6.5% exp (179 rating + orc racial)

Test 6
Swings	3117
c	1138	(36.51%)
m	855	(27.43%)
g	740	(23.74%)
p	238	(7.64%)
d	0	(0%)
h	146	(4.68%)

From what I've seen so far, even considering the small samples of tests 5 and 6, the trend of parry seems to get lower with expertise as much as dodge, and regardless of the crit you have over the softcap, there seems to be a 5% hit always in place. I estimate the parry rating of the target dummy to be about 14%, and the first test was made with Wepon Mastery that only reduces dodges, thus parry should have been reduced by around ~4.25% while dodges by ~5.25% and this seems to appear from the results (even if with some uncertainty).

I believe this 5% is the crit depression working in a way so that you have a minimum number of hits that your crit cannot prevent. Estimating the correct value needs a lot more samples since it's not even sure if this crit depression is flat or works differently between classes or weapon combinations.

I'm still running some tests on the lower level especially because Rallik in the "Retesting hit table" post found out that warriors could have a different value.

It would be nice to see more tests at lower and higher ends. If these things will happen consistently even when hitting from behind, we could say that the white critical cap is around 71% effective crit once hit and exp capped.

I'll try to update the spreadsheet since the collection is quite time-consuming especially when I can't use fast weapons. Any help, suggestion or confutation is appreciated.

• Melthu · 10/05/09, 10:23 PM

It looks to me like Blizz coded crit depression by forcing 4.8% (or whatever it is for a given class) of swings to always hit. Maybe there is a second type of "hit" that is above crits in the combat table. If WowWiki's listed combat table is correct (a big assumption, I know) then it would sit between Block and Crit since we know it's possible for tanks to become unhittable, at least against npcs.

bobxii · 10/06/09, 12:35 PM

Originally Posted by Melthu

It looks to me like Blizz coded crit depression by forcing 4.8% (or whatever it is for a given class) of swings to always hit. Maybe there is a second type of "hit" that is above crits in the combat table. If WowWiki's listed combat table is correct (a big assumption, I know) then it would sit between Block and Crit since we know it's possible for tanks to become unhittable, at least against npcs.

That assumes that the NPC -> PC hit table is the same as the PC -> NPC table; we know that they are not the same simply by looking at glancing/crushing blows. The existence of a second type of "forced" hit is plausible, however. Perhaps some testing by lower level (weapon skill) characters against the boss could show whether it actually exists, and whether glancing blow % pushes it from the table (as would seem likely since I've never seen a lvl 1 *hit* the ?? dummy).

I do suggest that the concepts of this thread could be better shown in graphical form (stacked line graphs with y-axis error bars), showing in this case "apparent crit cap%|apparent "forced hit"% (ordinate) vs expertise (abscissa)" and "actual crit % vs paperdoll crit %" (showing the conclusion drawn from test3+test4)

nesf · 10/08/09, 10:47 PM

Some in the Moonkin community have been getting 100% Starfire crits when crit capped for Lunar Eclipse. It hasn't to my knowledge been extensively tested but it would appear that for some abilities there is at present no crit depression being applied.

• Hamlet · 10/10/09, 12:20 AM

Originally Posted by nesf

Some in the Moonkin community have been getting 100% Starfire crits when crit capped for Lunar Eclipse. It hasn't to my knowledge been extensively tested but it would appear that for some abilities there is at present no crit depression being applied.

I've had parses with 100% Starfire crit, but not with enough spellcasts to reliably refute a 4.8% reduction. You could probably test this at a target dummy with a Mage giving you Imp. Scorch and Focus Magic. It's tricky to run a 100% Starfire crits, you need to rely on WiseEclipse mostly. But as long you get it most of the time, it would be easy enough to go for a few hundred casts and see if there are any non-crits while Eclipse is definitely up.

• Aldriana · 10/10/09, 2:51 AM

Spell crit reduction is conjectured to be smaller than the 4.8% number anyway - most suggestions I've heard are in the 2-3% range. Moreover, as spells are two-roll while melee attacks are one-roll, there's absolutely no reason to believe that the mechanics are the same anyway.

Starfox · 10/10/09, 9:41 AM

Originally Posted by Arawethion

I've had parses with 100% Starfire crit, but not with enough spellcasts to reliably refute a 4.8% reduction. You could probably test this at a target dummy with a Mage giving you Imp. Scorch and Focus Magic. It's tricky to run a 100% Starfire crits, you need to rely on WiseEclipse mostly. But as long you get it most of the time, it would be easy enough to go for a few hundred casts and see if there are any non-crits while Eclipse is definitely up.

Elicpse: 45%
IIS:      3%
IFF:      3%
NM:       4%
HotC:     3%
ISB:      5%
Char:    38.17% As moonkin with Idol up
      --------
        101.17% crit

Just a quick test where I could convince some guildmates to debuff the heroic target dummy for me

• frmorrison · 10/11/09, 12:57 PM

Originally Posted by Aldriana

Spell crit reduction is conjectured to be smaller than the 4.8% number anyway.

I recalled Vulajin or some Rogue did a long test that showed spell crit depression was 3%. Melee is 4.8%.

• Hamlet · 10/11/09, 1:21 PM

The "depression" you're talking about is just a sub-100% cap, right, not a flat crit% reduction?

• Aldriana · 10/11/09, 3:37 PM

That's sort of what we're here to figure out. For rogues, there is a straight percentage crit reduction against boss level mobs - that is, if you have less than 4.8% tooltip crit, your white attacks will never crit against an undebuffed target dummy. The assumption in the rogue community is that this is just a -4.8% modifier on your crit rate, and that's the end of that.

However, there is preliminary evidence that:
1) The size of the reduction may depend on class, and
2) The crit cap appears to not be in the place you'd expect based on a straight percentage reduction.

Hence, the point of this thread is to gather more data on the problem and see if we can figure out what's actually going on.

hellord · 10/11/09, 5:46 PM

For warriors there seems to be a different reduction once naked (4.95% crit).
At 4.95% crit I got around 1.5% effective in around 10k hits. At 7.58% I had an effective crit of around 3% in 10k hits. However at 8.09% on 41194 swings I had 1371 crits for a 3.3% effective crit rate that seems to suggest the depression could be the same for both rogue and warriors, but something prevents it to go under a minimum crit value.

EDIT: For specials it seems possible to have 100% critrate overcapping the depression. I don't know if this value is the same for spells but for what I could test so far is higher than 4.33% and probably lower than 4.8%.

Tested with improved Overpower 2/2 (+50% crit) and 54.33% (49.33% + rampage). I underlined rampage refresh before the regular hit happened.

Test with 54.78% crit, no hits so far, but I should expect 1 in ~5k sample so I'll continue samplig. However this exclude the chance that there is a hard cap under 100% crit for specials.

Rallik · 10/14/09, 6:15 AM

From your data, I'd agree that the following all appear likely:

1) Warriors do receive a full 4.8% crit depression, but for some currently unknown reason the full effect doesn't occur at very low levels of crit. This can be seen in the disparity in the effect of crit depression between the test at 4.95% crit and 8.09% crit.

2) For white attacks, crit depression is essentially turning 4.8% worth of crits into hits rather than reducing your crit chance by 4.8% before building the table. This leaves an irremovable 4.8% hit chance on the table and effectively lowers what we considered the crit cap to be previously by 4.8% since it doesn't seem as if you can stack 4.8% more crit to overcome crit depression. This can be seen in all of your initial tests which are showing a reasonably near to 4.8% hit rate when you should be well beyond the crit cap.

3) For special physical attacks, crit depression is likely still 4.8% and the effects of crit depression can actually be overcome entirely, unlike with white attacks.

• Hamlet · 10/14/09, 6:03 PM

Just got about 150 consecutive Starfire crits on an 83 target dummy, with 100.36% total chance to crit. (Only cast when Eclipse and Blessing of the Moongoddess were up). Pretty conclusively refutes a 4.8% crit reduction, though there could still be a smaller one. I'll try to test again when I think of some way that's not as annoying.

• Aldriana · 10/15/09, 3:28 AM

4.8% is for melee specials. The working theory I'd heard for spells was 3%, but I'm not sure that was ever conclusively proved. And it would seem to be refuted by your test anyway. Though it might differ depending on class.

Astrylian · 10/18/09, 7:25 PM

Has there been any testing of this on the lvl80 dummy? ie, the 4.8% crit depression against bosses actually being a conversion of the 'first' 4.8% of crits into hits makes sense... But it could also simply be that the hit part of the combat table is a minimum of 5%. So when crit capped, do you get any hits on the lvl80 dummy? If not, the 4.8% crit->hit theory seems sound.